Long before the name Azerbaijan existed, the land north of the Aras River had been inhabited since the Palaeolithic: the petroglyphs of Gobustan, with carvings up to twelve thousand years old showing hunters, boats and ritual dances, are among the oldest and densest examples of rock art in the world. On that ancient foundation, around the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, the kingdom of Caucasian Albania flourished (no relation to Balkan Albania). It was a state that brought together dozens of tribes, and its first capital was Gabala, in today's Qabala district, later moved south to Partaw, present-day Barda.
Caucasian Albania was one of the first states in the world to adopt Christianity, as early as the beginning of the 4th century, and it developed its own alphabet and liturgy. But the region also carried an older and more unusual spiritual imprint, tied to its extraordinary geology. On the Absheron Peninsula and across wide areas of the country, natural gas from underground rises to the surface and ignites spontaneously, creating perpetual fires that burn with no visible fuel. Those natural flames made the region a sacred place for Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion that revered fire as a symbol of divine purity.
According to the most widely accepted etymology, that is where the country's very name comes from: Azerbaijan would derive from a Persian root linked to fire (azar) and, through the figure of the satrap Atropates, to the idea of a land guarded by sacred fire. Fire temples and burning hillsides like Yanardag kept that reputation alive for centuries, drawing Zoroastrian, Hindu and Sikh pilgrims from Persia and India well into the modern era. So the Land of Fire is not a recent slogan, but an identity rooted in prehistory and in the oldest religion of the Iranian plateau.
In the 7th century, the Arab expansion reached the Caucasus: around the middle of that century the Caliphate's armies subdued Caucasian Albania and the whole region was absorbed into the Islamic world. Islamisation was gradual but deep, and Arabic coexisted with Persian as a language of culture. The old Caucasian Albanian identity slowly faded, absorbed partly by the Armenian Church and partly by the new Muslim civilisation, while most of the local population embraced Islam, which is still the country's dominant religion today, with a large Shia majority.
Between the 11th and 12th centuries, waves of Turkic peoples, above all the Oghuz Seljuks, settled in the region and changed its ethnic and linguistic make-up for good: from the fusion of the local population, the Turkic language and the towering Persian culture came the Azerbaijani people and their language, a Turkic tongue written for centuries in Arabic script. It was a time of cultural brilliance under Turco-Persian dynasties such as the Eldiguzid atabegs of Azerbaijan, who ruled from Ganja and Nakhchivan and turned the region into a bright centre of Islamic civilisation.
The greatest symbol of that flowering is Nizami Ganjavi (c. 1141-1209), born and buried in Ganja, considered the greatest romantic epic poet of the Persian language. His five great poems, gathered in the Khamsa or Quintet (among them Layla and Majnun and The Seven Beauties), are peaks of world literature and made Nizami a national glory, celebrated to this day with museums and mausoleums. He sums up the deeply Persian nature of medieval Azerbaijani high culture, a trait that the Safavid dynasty would reinforce centuries later: founded in 1501 by Shah Ismail I, who was Azerbaijani by origin and language, it made Shiism the state religion across the Persian world and tied Azerbaijan's fate to Iran's for more than three centuries.
For much of the Middle Ages, the most enduring local power was that of the Shirvanshahs, a dynasty that ruled the kingdom of Shirvan, in the north-east of today's Azerbaijan, for almost eight centuries, one of the longest-lived lineages in the Islamic world. For a long time their capital was Shamakhi, surrounded by vineyards and struck again and again by earthquakes, until in the 15th century they moved their court to Baku. There they built the majestic Palace of the Shirvanshahs, now the heart of the walled city of Icheri Sheher (Baku's Old City), a World Heritage Site together with the enigmatic Maiden Tower.
The region endured the devastating Mongol invasions of the 13th century and the campaigns of Tamerlane, and was later absorbed into the great Turco-Persian powers: the Aq Qoyunlu, the Safavids and, in the 18th century, the short-lived empire of Nader Shah. The violent death of that conqueror in 1747 brought about the collapse of central Persian power and opened a decisive period of fragmentation: the territory of today's Azerbaijan split into some twenty independent or semi-independent khanates (Baku, Shaki, Ganja, Karabakh, Quba, Shirvan, Talysh and Nakhchivan, among others), small states ruled by khans who fought each other and sought protection from Persia, Russia or the Ottoman Empire in turn.
For all its instability, the age of the khanates left a remarkable heritage. The Shaki Khanate, which flourished between 1743 and 1819, made the city a great silk centre and left behind the splendid Khan's Palace of 1762, built without a single nail and decorated with handcrafted stained glass (shebeke) and frescoes, now a World Heritage Site. These khanates would very soon become the pieces the great powers fought over on the Caucasian chessboard, and their fate would be sealed by the unstoppable advance of the Russian Empire from the north.
In the early 19th century, the Russian Empire set out to conquer the South Caucasus, which brought it into conflict with Qajar Persia in two long wars. The first Russo-Persian War (1804-1813) ended in Persian defeat and the Treaty of Gulistan, signed on 24 October 1813: under it, Persia recognised Russian sovereignty over most of the khanates of today's Azerbaijan (Ganja, Karabakh, Shaki, Shirvan, Quba, Baku and Lankaran, among others), as well as southern Dagestan and eastern Georgia.
The second war (1826-1828) settled the division for good. The Treaty of Turkmenchay, signed on 10 February 1828, forced Persia to give up the khanates it still held north of the Aras River, including those of Erivan, Nakhchivan and Talysh. The result was a historic rupture with huge consequences: the Aras became a border, and the Azerbaijani people were split in two. The northern half, today's Republic of Azerbaijan, became part of the Russian Empire; the southern half, where a very large Azerbaijani population still lives today, larger even than that of the independent country, stayed within Iran, in the region known as Iranian Azerbaijan.
Under Russian rule, Azerbaijani society began to change. The treaties included clauses that encouraged the resettlement of Christian Armenians from Persia and the Ottoman Empire into the newly conquered lands, especially around Erivan and Karabakh, shifting the demographic balance in a way whose consequences would explode a century and a half later. At the same time, joining the vast Russian market and the arrival of industrial capitalism paved the way for the event that would change the country's destiny: oil.
The surface oil of Absheron had been known since ancient times, but it was in the second half of the 19th century that it became a source of colossal wealth. In 1846, near Baku, what is usually considered the world's first oil well was drilled, decades before Pennsylvania. From the 1870s, with the arrival of industrial drilling, Baku went through a black-gold rush that turned it into the world's oil capital: by around 1901 it was producing more than half of all the crude on the planet.
The great fortunes of the day flocked to that boom. The Swedish Nobel brothers founded the Branobel company, which built pipelines and the world's first steam-powered oil tanker; the Rothschild family entered the business in the 1880s. Baku filled up with the lavish mansions of the oil magnates, the so-called "oil barons", and at the same time with a crowded, multi-ethnic industrial working class in which early labour struggles took shape; a young revolutionary called Stalin cut his teeth there. That rapid modernisation went hand in hand with growing national tensions between Azerbaijanis and Armenians, which erupted into violence in 1905 and again in 1918.
The collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 opened a historic window. On 28 May 1918, Azerbaijani leaders in Tbilisi proclaimed the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, with its capital eventually in Baku. It was a world milestone: the first parliamentary and secular republic in the whole Muslim world, which in its short life set up an elected parliament, made Azerbaijani the official language, founded the country's first university and gave women the right to vote, ahead of many Western democracies. The young republic survived barely twenty-three months: on 28 April 1920 the Bolshevik Red Army entered Baku and ended its independence.
Absorbed into the USSR, Azerbaijan first became part of the short-lived Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and, from 1936, the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, with Baku as its capital. It was one of the most economically strategic regions of the entire Soviet Union: its oil fuelled Stalinist industrialisation and proved vital during the Second World War, so much so that capturing the Baku oilfields was one of the stated goals of the German offensive towards the Caucasus in 1942. The Soviet period also settled a question loaded with future consequences: the creation, in 1923, of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, an Armenian-majority enclave inside the Azerbaijani republic.
The Soviet era industrialised the country and taught it to read, imposed state atheism and changed the alphabet three times (from Arabic to Latin and then to Cyrillic), but it also harshly crushed any national dissent. A key figure emerged in those decades: Heydar Aliyev, head of the local KGB and then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan from 1969, who would become the country's strongman for half a century.
The end of the USSR brought violence. In January 1990, Soviet troops entered Baku to crush the independence movement and put down a demonstration, leaving more than a hundred civilians dead, in the day remembered as "Black January". Amid growing national mobilisation and already caught up in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Azerbaijan declared independence on 30 August 1991 and confirmed it by constitutional act on 18 October that year, shortly before the final dissolution of the Soviet Union. Seventy years on, the country thus regained the sovereignty it had lost in 1920, but in the worst possible conditions: in the middle of a war.
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the issue that has defined independent Azerbaijan. Its roots lie in the Soviet decision of 1923 to create an Armenian-majority autonomous region inside Azerbaijan. As the USSR weakened, in 1988 the enclave's Armenian population demanded union with Armenia, and the dispute escalated into the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994). That war ended in an Armenian victory: Armenia and the forces of the self-proclaimed Artsakh took control of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding Azerbaijani districts, while around a million Azerbaijanis were displaced from those areas. The conflict also left a trail of massacres on both sides and a wound that stayed open for almost three decades.
At home, the instability of the early years gave way to the return to power of Heydar Aliyev, president from 1993, who stabilised the country and in 1994 signed the so-called "Contract of the Century" with a consortium of Western oil companies, laying the foundations for a new era of Caspian oil and gas. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, opened in 2006, made it possible to export that crude to the Mediterranean without crossing Russia or Iran, and turned Azerbaijan into a key energy player. In 2003 Heydar Aliyev was succeeded as president by his son Ilham Aliyev, in a dynastic-style handover of power; oil revenues paid for Baku's spectacular makeover, with icons like the Flame Towers, but they also consolidated a highly personalist regime criticised for its restrictions on freedoms.
The status quo of the conflict broke down in 2020. In a 44-day war (the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War), Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, retook the seven districts and a large part of the enclave, including the symbolic city of Shusha, until a Russian-brokered ceasefire on 10 November 2020. In September 2023, a lightning Azerbaijani offensive led to the surrender of the Artsakh authorities and the exodus of practically the entire Armenian population of the region, ending more than three decades of conflict by force. Azerbaijan thus regained full control of Nagorno-Karabakh, an outcome celebrated in Baku as national reunification and mourned by Armenians as the erasure of their ancestral presence. Today the country faces the challenges of the post-war period, the rebuilding of the recovered territories and the need to diversify an economy that still depends heavily on oil and gas.
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Baku, the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, looks out over the Caspian Sea from an amphitheatre-shaped bay. Its historic core is the walled city of Icheri Sheher, a medieval maze of stone lanes that preserves the Palace of the Shirvanshahs (the old rulers of Shirvan, who moved their court here in the 15th century) and the enigmatic Maiden Tower (Qız Qalası), whose origin and purpose are still debated. The whole ensemble was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000, the country's first.
The second Baku is the one born of the oil rush. Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city became the world capital of crude, and the magnates of the day surrounded it with a belt of mansions and European-style boulevards. That oil DNA resurfaced in the 21st century in spectacular architecture paid for by new energy revenues: the Flame Towers, three flame-shaped skyscrapers that light up the city's night skyline, the curving Heydar Aliyev Center designed by Zaha Hadid, and a seafront promenade, the Boulevard, that shows off the shine of contemporary Baku.
An hour south of Baku, Gobustan National Park protects one of the largest concentrations of rock art on the planet: around six thousand carvings, some up to twelve thousand years old, showing hunting scenes, reed boats, ritual dances, animals and human figures. This cultural landscape, a World Heritage Site since 2007, records thousands of years of continuous settlement and offers a unique window into the lives of the prehistoric hunters and herders of the Caspian.
Gobustan is also a geological marvel. Its plains hold the highest density of active mud volcanoes in the world: craters that bubble and spit cold mud, gas and water from deep below, a lunar spectacle directly linked to the same hydrocarbon pockets that made the region famous. Next to the petroglyphs there is also a stone that makes musical sounds when struck (the gaval dash), a sign that this spot was a place of gathering and ceremony for millennia.
The Absheron Peninsula, where Baku stands, is the epicentre of the Land of Fire. Here natural gas rises from underground and burns spontaneously, a phenomenon that made the region a sanctuary for fire worship. At Yanardag, the "burning mountain", a hillside has been burning for centuries without going out, fed by gas seeping through the rock; it is a living picture of why this land was sacred to Zoroastrians.
A few kilometres away stands the Ateshgah, the fire temple of Surakhani, a pentagonal sanctuary built around a natural gas well between the 17th and 18th centuries. It was a pilgrimage site for Zoroastrians, Hindus and Sikhs from Persia and India, who saw in the perpetual flame of the central altar a manifestation of the divine. Yanardag and the Ateshgah are today the great visitor sites of that fiery heritage that gave the country its name and its soul.
Baku holds much of Azerbaijan's population, wealth and power. It is the largest city in the Caucasus and one of the most important in the Caspian basin, home to the government, the oil and gas industry and a cosmopolitan cultural life inherited from its imperial and Soviet past. The great oil and gas pipelines that carry Azerbaijani energy to Europe start here, and this is where the course is set for a country that in recent decades has thrown itself into projecting an international image.
That showcase ambition has meant hosting big events: a Formula 1 Grand Prix that races past the walls of the Old City, festivals, continental sporting competitions and, in 2024, the COP29 global climate summit. Twenty-first-century Baku thus combines the weight of its thousands of years of history with the ambition of an energy capital that wants to be seen, a tension that sets the pulse of all of Azerbaijan.
The Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic (Naxçıvan) is a geographical oddity: Azerbaijani territory separated from the rest of the country by a strip of Armenia, with no land link to it, and also bordering Iran and Turkey. Its history is extremely old; local tradition even links its name to Noah and his ark, and holds that the city was one of the first settlements after the Flood, which would make it one of the oldest towns in the world.
Nakhchivan was an independent khanate in the 18th century and, after the Treaty of Turkmenchay of 1828, passed to the Russian Empire along with the rest of the region. In Soviet times it became an autonomous republic within Azerbaijan, a status it keeps today. During the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict it was isolated and blockaded, and its survival depended on support from Turkey and Iran, the only countries with which it has open borders.
The region's most famous monument is the Momine Khatun Mausoleum, in the city of Nakhchivan, a late-12th-century funerary tower built on the orders of the Eldiguzid Atabeg Jahan Pahlavan in memory of his mother. With its ten-sided body covered in intricate geometric patterns and calligraphy in turquoise glazed brick, it is a masterpiece of the Nakhchivan school of architecture and one of the great icons of medieval Azerbaijani art.
Beyond this monument, Nakhchivan has a rich heritage of mausoleums, mountain fortresses and the Alinja complex, a citadel perched on an almost impregnable peak that held out for years against the siege of Tamerlane's troops. Arid and mountainous, linked by legend to the biblical origins of humankind, Nakhchivan packs into a small territory many of the historical layers that make Azerbaijan a crossroads of civilisations.
Ganja, Azerbaijan's second city, is above all the birthplace of the poet Nizami Ganjavi (c. 1141-1209), the greatest romantic epic poet of the Persian language, whose mausoleum stands on the outskirts of the city and whose figure is a source of national pride. Founded in the early Middle Ages, Ganja was a brilliant centre of Islamic culture under the Atabegs and an important khanate in the 18th century, until it resisted the Russian advance: its last khan, Javad Khan, died defending it in 1804, an episode Azerbaijanis remember as a symbol of resistance.
The city keeps brick mosques from the time of Shah Abbas, old caravanserais and a curious Bottle House, a home covered with tens of thousands of glass bottles. In Soviet times it was renamed Kirovabad, until it got its historic name back with independence. Nearby, among mountain forests, lies the stunning Lake Goygol, formed by an earthquake in the 12th century and now protected as a national park.
For centuries Shamakhi (Şamaxı) was the capital of the kingdom of Shirvan and the seat of the Shirvanshahs before they moved to Baku. Set in a wine-growing region, it was a great Silk Road trading centre and a leading cultural hub, although its history is marked by the earthquakes that destroyed it and saw it rebuilt again and again. It keeps the Juma (Friday) Mosque, one of the oldest in the Caucasus, whose origins go back to the 8th century and which has been rebuilt after successive quakes.
On the outskirts of the town stand the Yeddi Gumbez, the "seven domes", mausoleums of the family of the khans of Shamakhi and one of the most evocative funerary complexes in the country. The region keeps a strong winemaking tradition, a legacy of a time when Shirvan wine was famous, and is also home to the national astrophysical observatory, which takes advantage of its mountain skies.
Naftalan is unique in the world: a spa whose signature treatment is bathing in crude oil. Since the late 19th century, a particular type of crude, naftalan, has been extracted there, credited with therapeutic properties for skin, joint and nervous-system conditions. Patients soak in tubs of warm oil under medical supervision, a practice that drew the curious and the sick from all over the Soviet bloc and that today supports a peculiar health-tourism industry.
The name naftalan, from the same root as "naphtha", was even given to pharmaceutical products sold in various countries. The town, small and quiet, revolves around its sanatoriums and embodies, in healing form, the close and age-old relationship Azerbaijan has with its oil: here black gold is neither burned nor exported, but used to heal.
Sheki is one of Azerbaijan's oldest cities and one of its most beautiful, perched in the wooded foothills of the Greater Caucasus. Set on the old Silk Road, it thrived for centuries as a trading centre and, between 1743 and 1819, as the capital of a powerful khanate. Silkworm breeding and the cocoon trade made it rich, and that prosperity can still be seen in its stone caravanserais and merchants' houses.
Its most famous monument is the Khan's Palace (Xan Sarayı), built around 1762 without a single nail. It has handcrafted stained-glass windows called shebeke —mosaics of thousands of pieces of coloured glass fitted together without glue— and frescoes that cover its rooms with flowers, birds, hunting scenes and battles. In 2019, Sheki's historic centre and the Khan's Palace were declared a Unesco World Heritage Site, in recognition of their unique architecture and their role on the trade routes between East and West.
Today's Gabala (Qabala) holds some of the country's oldest memories: it was the first capital of the kingdom of Caucasian Albania, back in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, when it was known as Kabalaka. For centuries it was a major urban centre in the Caucasus, and its ancient ruins can still be visited near the modern town, a reminder of a state that embraced Christianity before most of Europe.
Today Gabala has reinvented itself as one of Azerbaijan's main mountain destinations. Surrounded by the forests, rivers and waterfalls of the Greater Caucasus, it offers Lake Nohur, the Tufandag ski and cable-car resort, and modern tourist infrastructure that has made it popular with Azerbaijanis themselves. The mix of an ancient past and spectacular nature makes the Gabala region a unique meeting point of history and the outdoors.
Clinging to the mountains in a hard-to-reach valley, the cobbled village of Lahij has been famous for centuries for its copperwork. Its coppersmiths and blacksmiths still work by hammer, chasing trays, jugs and utensils with traditional motifs, in a craft handed down from generation to generation that has turned the village into a small living museum of Caucasian trades.
Lahij also keeps a remarkable traditional layout, with cobbled streets, an old sewer system and stone houses adapted to the area's earthquakes. Its people speak their own Iranian language, Tat, distinct from Azerbaijani, which shows the enormous ethnic and linguistic diversity these mountains hold. It is one of the most charming villages in the country and a must-stop for anyone travelling around the north-west.
In the far north-west, almost at the border with Georgia and Russia, Zaqatala is a quiet town surrounded by vast forests of hazel, walnut and chestnut trees. Hazelnuts are in fact one of the region's great products, exported to much of the world. Its setting of mountains and villages, in an area of great ethnic diversity where Azerbaijanis, Avars, Tsakhurs and other Caucasian peoples live side by side, makes it an ideal base for exploring the nature of the borderlands.
Zaqatala also has its place in modern history: in the 19th century it saw uprisings against Russian rule, and its old fortress was used as a prison, where mutinous sailors from the battleship Potemkin were once held. Forests, waterfalls, mountain villages and a rebellious past define this remote, green corner of the country.
Quba (Guba) is the centre of a fertile orchard region, famous throughout Azerbaijan for its apples and its hand-woven carpets, part of the great Azerbaijani carpet-weaving tradition recognised by Unesco. It was the capital of a khanate in the 18th century, when Fatali Khan extended his power over much of the north-east, and it keeps historic mosques and bathhouses, as well as a notable community of Mountain Jews settled in neighbouring Krasnaya Sloboda, one of the last in the world.
Quba also holds a tragic page of recent history: in 1918, during the ethnic clashes that accompanied the collapse of the Russian Empire, the town and its surroundings saw massacres of the Muslim population. In 2007 a mass grave was discovered there, now turned into a genocide memorial that commemorates those events. Beyond that, the region is the gateway to the spectacular canyons, rivers and villages of the country's north.
At around 2,200 metres above sea level, Khinalug (Xınalıq) is one of the highest and oldest continuously inhabited villages in the Caucasus. Its stone houses are stacked in terraces up the slope, so that the roof of one home serves as the courtyard of the one above, in a vertical layout adapted to the mountain. Isolated for centuries, the village keeps its own unique language —Ketsh or Khinalug, unlike any other—, spoken only by its community and considered one of the most singular languages on the planet.
In 2023, the cultural landscape of Khinalug and the ancient transhumance route known as Köç Yolu were inscribed on Unesco's World Heritage List, in recognition of an age-old pastoral way of life that still moves flocks between the mountain pastures and the lowlands. Visiting Khinalug is a glimpse into a world suspended in time, among clouds, stone and tradition.
Near the town of Qusar lies Shahdag, Azerbaijan's main mountain and ski resort, developed in recent decades as the flagship of the country's winter tourism. At the foot of Mount Shahdag and Bazardüzü —Azerbaijan's highest peak, at over 4,400 metres—, it offers ski and snowboard slopes in winter and hiking among alpine peaks and valleys in summer.
The region is part of the great barrier of the Greater Caucasus that separates Azerbaijan from Russia and Dagestan, a world of high peaks, glaciers and remote villages. Shahdag symbolises the country's push to diversify beyond Baku and oil, making the most of a mountain heritage as imposing as it is little known outside the Caucasus.
Lankaran (Lənkəran) is the main city of southern Azerbaijan, a subtropical corner on the Caspian Sea very close to the border with Iran. It was the capital of the Talysh Khanate, a small independent state that emerged around 1747 after the death of Nader Shah and survived until Russia's victory in the war of 1826-1828 dissolved it and, through the Treaty of Turkmenchay, absorbed it into the Russian Empire. The city keeps traces of that era, such as its lighthouse and old fortress, and has the relaxed feel of a seaside town.
The warm, humid climate of the south makes this one of the most fertile regions in the country. Tea, rice and citrus fruit are grown here, and the local cuisine has its own flavours, distinct from the rest of Azerbaijan. It is also the land of the Talysh people, an Iranian-speaking minority living in the far south, between the mountains and the sea, who give the area a particular cultural identity.
In the far south, right on the border with Iran, Astara is a frontier town between the Caspian and the dense forests of the Talysh Mountains. Its great natural treasure is the Hyrcanian forests, a very ancient type of humid subtropical and temperate forest, a relic of the woodlands that covered the region before the ice ages. This ecosystem, which also stretches across northern Iran, is home to extraordinary biodiversity and unique tree species.
In 2019, the Hyrcanian forests were declared a Unesco World Heritage Site for their exceptional natural value, and in Azerbaijan they are protected in Hirkan (Girkan) National Park. On top of this forest heritage, Astara adds Caspian beaches, hot springs and a border culture blending Azerbaijani, Talysh and Iranian influences, in one of the greenest and most humid landscapes in the whole country.
Hardly anything that happened to Azerbaijan happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
